Let me start with an admission: I don’t know anything about Bhutanese politics, so I can’t really tell you how accurate this is. My understanding of the history of Bhutan is on the Wikipedia level, so accurate, but surface-level. One thing to note here is that the country did not become a full democracy but instead moved from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy. What has happened after the events of the movie is that last year Bhutan was removed from the UN list of least developed countries.

And is this “refreshingly different”? The more I think about it the less I’m sure about this.

Secondly, a joke I beliave to be Finnish in origin, but I’m not sure:

Two economists are walking together when they come across some dog shit. One of them has an idea he finds funny. “Hey, you eat that and I’ll pay you a grand.” The other thinks for a moment and then does it. A grand exchanges hands and the journey continues. Soon enough they come across some more dog shit. The other man wants to get back at the first man, so he makes the same offer. The first man obliges, money changes hands and they continue on. Soon one of them realizes something: “Hey, we just both ate dog shit and neither of us got any money for it.” “Sure,” the other man says, “but we both increased our revenue.”

The reason I’m telling you this is to point out that GDP as a measure of actual development is out of date. GDP is essentially the sum of all revenue in a country. It just doesn’t mean anything when a bunch of banks can gamble on stock prices and that’s where the GDP growth is coming from. How is that helping the people who are trying to pay their rent? How is this considered beneficial for a nation?

This is why Bhutan is trying to do things differently. They try to measure GNH, gross national happiness, instead. Instead of gamifying how much money they can make move around, they have gamified making people happy. I can appreciate that. That is what all of our leaders should be prioritizing.

So finally on to the movie.

While it might not be ha-ha funny (although there definitely are good jokes with very nice setups), this is essentially political satire, but as the tradition of making movies is relatively new in Bhutan (IMDb lists a total of 46 movies with Bhutan as the country of origin and the oldest of them is from 1999), it doesn’t feel like a political satire in the same way as Wag the Dog, In the Loop or Dr. Strangelove. It is not extreme in the same way. It doesn’t need to go fully out there to make a point.

The year is 2006. A guru on his spiritual retreat (he has only two years left, apparently) hears about the king’s abdication and that the first elections are coming up with a shadow election preceding them in order to help people understand what elections even are. The guru gives his assistant an ominous mission: get him two guns. So, the assistant goes out of his way to find some. In the meantime, an American gun collector has heard of a very specific US Civil War era rifle having been found in Bhutan of all places. He has arrived to acquire with the help of a local guide. You can guess how these two parties are going to meet.

However, there’s a completely different strain of the plot as well: Government officials are trying to show the locals how elections work and how important they are. This is causing rifts among the small village we are following as two competing candidates vie for votes, including pure bribes of money or an old television.

The thing is, the country had been completely isolated from the Internet and televisions were banned until relatively recently, especially relative to the time the movie depicts. So, the things that would seem natural to us are often very strange and different for them. That is why they need to teach people what elections are.

And they have simplified the elections as well. Instead of having candidates, they have colors representing ideas. We have blue for egalitarianism, red for industrial development and yellow for stability. Sure, there’s actual candidates behind these colors, but people are specifically asked to choose from the colors and if you know how to read film, you will figure out what will happen with these.

Let’s get back to Finland for a moment. There’s a Finnish book from 1909 called Punainen viiva (The Red Line). It came out only a couple years after the first elections in Finland (which were held before our independence when we were an autonomous Grand Duchy within Russia). It was about a poor family man and how he put his hopes and dreams into the elections. The titular red line refers to the voting method as well. If you weren’t literate, you could choose to vote for a party instead of a person (we use D’Hondt method, look it up if you don’t know what that is). However, the book ends with man dying as well as one of his kids (might have been two, actually, it has been a while since I read it) leaving his wife and other kids to fend for themselves in a small cottage in the harsh Finnish wilderness.

(Spoiler ahead)

The Red Line was about how democracy won’t fix everything on it’s own. Powerful people are still powerful people. The Monk with the Gun is about how people reject elections, because they think things are fine. When the shadow election happens, people vote yellow even though locally there was no real yellow candidate, because yellow is seen as the king’s color. So, now the movie suddenly becomes a kind od defense of absolute monarchy. Then again, if the people are happy with it, why change it? The way it is depicted in the movie, this is not about fake elections in the sense that a dictator wants to seem legitimate and to not have a real opposition.

This is where I’m not sure the movie fully works anymore. They did a good job portraying how Bhutanese are very different. The old man who finds the gun is actually haggling the price down when negotiating for it, because he is thinking about karma as well. He even gives the gun away to the monk when the buyers are out to find the money, because you should be helping monks.

Now, that part of the plot makes me question who this movie was made for. If this is the way Bhutanese operate, there clearly was no need to have this in the movie to explain the people to themselves. So, was this movie just a propaganda piece for us outsiders? Or was it producers outside of Bhutan who just wanted these kinds of awkward scenes to explain the people as the movie was an international co-production?

Finally, we learn why the lama actually needs the gun: He wants to bury it under their new stupa to ritually ease the tensions around the voting. Now, I can’t claim to be an expert on Buddhism, but aren’t stupas a place to store relics? If so, do you want a gun in there as well? And not just any gun, but a gun that had been used to kill scores of Tibetians and possibly many more in the US before that, as well as a pair AK-47s and a cop’s sidearm that are also around after many, many events in the story.

Well, I’m not that interested in the last point. It just felt weird, but what’s going on around the voting feels problematic. Sure, our democracies are not working as well as they could, because we haven’t organized them properly nor have we been willing to change them as quickly as we should have. I do still prefer living in a democracy to any other options available to us in the world. I should also note here that to all the people thinking of US politics right now, the good ol’ beacon of Western Enlightenment is not, unlike various former East Block and South American countries, actually considered a working democracy by experts.

So, I don’t know how to feel about this movie. It is an interesting look at the Bhutanese culture and, in general, I like that kind of movies where I can learn about something in an entertaining way while understanding that this isn’t the final word on the topic. It just bothers me that there is a feel like I’m being fed some specific narrative. Considering the age of Bhutanese democracy, they rank generally pretty well, but they are still far below even countries like the US, so they have a long way to go.

Sure, the movie gives us a very idyllic look at the countryside of Bhutan, but given the way the story is told, can we really trust this? Then there is the GNH, which is something I do find compelling.

So, here’s one final thing regarding economics: We have two different ways of looking at how well an economy is doing – the average and minimum. If we look at the average, like we do in a sense with GDP, we are happy with small portion of the population taking up all the oxygen and leaving nothing to the rest. If we look at the the minimum, we want to work to make the lives better for those who are doing the worst. I find the latter way much more compelling. Now, regarding GNH, our happiness is tied to the happiness of the people around us. If we have a disabled child, we want that child to have opportunities to live a full life so that they can be happy, so that we can be happy. This is where GNH works much better than GDP, as the inequalities have a tendency to cause unhappiness to even the supposed winners of the system (see the Some More News episode on this).